Kate Clay has been a registered nurse since 1977 and received a Master's degree in Biomedical Ethics in 1995. Her most recent nursing practice has been in oncology, with a special interest in advance directives and end of life care.
She has held her current position as Program Director at the Center for Shared Decision Making at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) in Lebanon, NH, USA, since 2002. The focus of her work has been on integrating patient decision aids and decision support into clinical care, demonstrating the feasibility and value of this approach to local and outside stakeholders, and facilitating replication of this work in other sites in the US and internationally. Current ongoing integration projects at DHMC range from internal medicine/primary care to prostate and breast cancer and orthopaedic conditions (hip and knee osteoarthritis, back pain). New projects are under way using a heart disease treatment choices decision aid and a study of decision making for adjuvant treatment after breast cancer surgery. This work is funded in large part by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making and makes extensive use of the Health Dialog/Foundation's video/booklet decision aid programs.
In parallel to her work with decision aids, Kate has also been trained in decision support as a clinical skill, counseled patients based on this training, and trained hundreds of nurses, medical students, social workers, physicians and others using an online auto-tutorial and hands-on workshop designed in collaboration with Dr. Annette O'Connor and her team at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in Ottawa, Canada.
Recent publications:
France Légaré, Stephen A. Kearing, Kate Clay, Susie Gagnon, Denis D'Amours, Michel Rousseau, Annette M. O'Connor. "Are you SURE? Assessing Patient Decisional Conflict with a 4-item Screening Test." Accepted by Canadian Family Physician, October 2009.
Carol Bennett, Ian D. Graham, Elizabeth Kristjansson, Stephen A. Kearing, Kate F. Clay, Annette M. O'Connor. "Validation of a Preparation for Decision Making Scale." Patient Educ Couns (2009), doi:10.1016/ j.pec.2009.05.012.
Weinstein JN, Clay K, Morgan TS. Informed Patient Choice: Patient-Centered Valuing of Surgical Risks and Benefits, Health Affairs, Vol. 26, No.3, May-June 2007, pp. 726-730.